Don't make fun of people on the left with mental issues,
@crush. This, from Public Substack, will help you understand their illness.
JD Haltigan: The Emotional Dysregulation Behind Progressive Authoritarianism
The vulnerable narcissism of the Radical Left
We’ve all experienced it. You get in an argument with someone who knows little about the subject they’re talking about, but who is absolutely confident they’re right. Maybe it’s police violence, maybe it’s climate change, or school closures during the pandemic. They’re reciting tired progressive talking points that have been debunked a dozen times over. You’re presenting them with counterarguments that are hardly original, but your interlocutor seems to have never considered them before. Pretty soon they’re backed into a corner.
So they pull out the card you knew was coming from the very beginning: “Oh, so you’re just content to let them die???”
The argument has now pivoted from a dispute over facts and reason to an unwinnable contest over who has the purer heart. And the assumption is, quite clearly, that you’re the monster for having your awful opinions. You can keep arguing if you want, but at this point there’s no more persuasion to be had, if there ever was any. You’ve been condemned for your thought crimes and there’s no appeals process. The person you just wasted ten minutes arguing with will walk away with their position utterly unchanged, but their opinion of you diminished. According to terms you never agreed to, you’ve lost the debate.
This is one of the more banal manifestations of Left Wing Authoritarianism, which J.D. Haltigan, an independent scientist and researcher specializing in developmental and evolutionary psychopathology, has been studying for years.
In the summer of 2020, as the protests and riots over the death of George Floyd tore through the country, Haltigan started noticing something new in radical left-wing politics. The sort of interpersonal condemnation described above had become the basis of an entire social movement.
“So you take an event, you blow it up,” Haltigan explains. “You claim racism, you claim sexism, you claim climate crisis catastrophizing, and you use that as a cudgel interpersonally to shut down anybody that disagrees with those assertions.”
Haltigan believes that the culture of radical left politics derives from narcissistic personality disorder, but of a less familiar type than the one we know best. The one we’re most familiar with — the kind we associate with Donald Trump or Kanye West — is grandiose narcissism, which is essentially megalomania. The other kind is vulnerable narcissism. Unlike their grandiose counterparts, vulnerable narcissists tend to obsess over their own victimization, feel sorry for themselves but for nobody else, constantly seek attention from others, and experience even the slightest criticism as a mortal wound.
“It's all based on feelings,” Haltigan says. “There's no structure. It's all just sort of this sort of plastic goo of emotion. And that leads to chaos when it's at scale. And that's what's happening in all of our institutions.”
Taken to an extreme, this way of, as Haltigan characterizes it, “female relating” around “relationships and feelings” can easily lead to the kind of authoritarianism we’ve seen in the culture over the past several years. Just as in a one-on-one argument with a radical leftist, at the organizational level, this chaotic swirl of feelings of victimhood, emotional fragility, and the desperate need for validation “create this sort of Left-wing, dysregulated way of silencing other people.”
“You’re committing racism, you’re committing injustice, you’re committing genocide. And in the case of COVID, if you open up, you’re committing eugenics,” he said. “So it’s a feeling-based [relation] that gives the sort of license for this emotional dysregulation and left-wing authoritarianism to then be used against the quote-unquote vast normal population that knows these are isolated events or that you're not committing genocide.”
The personality traits of vulnerable narcissism have come to dominate not only progressive activism, but, increasingly, the mainstream elite institutions that have been taken over by left-wing activists. Haltigan experienced this firsthand, in his own professional life.
After earning his Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the University of Miami, Haltigan completed several post-doctorate positions and spent several years in the psychiatry department at the University of Toronto. However, he became disillusioned with an increasingly stifling academic environment.
“It was degrading. You can't explore group differences anymore. I mean, frankly, if you're looking at sex-based differences in mental health, you run into trouble even because two sexes is sort of a cultural war issue now with the gender identity insanity that's off the rails,” Haltigan said. “I mean, that's really no way to soft pedal what's happening with that.”
Everyone has their boiling point, and Haltigan’s response to a compelled Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) statement marked a divergence in his career.
“When you do science, it's hard work, especially with data, getting things right, going back and checking your analyses, writing code. And so it was just sort of, enough is enough,” he said. “I posted on my Substack a sort of a pseudo DEI statement, which I submitted as actually part of an application package and where I just basically said this stuff is ridiculous.”
That statement led to a First Amendment lawsuit, which is still pending.
From both his personal experience and his observations of the world, it has become something of a mission for Haltigan to inform the public about how these personality disorders are shaping our institutions and our public debates. “[It’s] crucial to understand how that’s influencing politics, how that's influencing what's happening in our cities,” he said. “That's the whole idea behind my Substack really is to sort of integrate mental health, psychopathology, research, and connecting social policy so that people can understand how these things are related.”
